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Day One

Bloom released a major new version of Day One for Mac and iOS last week. And it’s a beautiful thing. But it’s a very expensive beautiful thing: $56 for the Mac app and $14 for the iOS app (after the introductory 50% off sale ends next week). That’s a total of $70 for full-on cross-platform journaling. Very, very not cheap.

Day One is a capable enough journaling app. You can post text entries to your journal, and you can attach multiple photos to an entry. Day One will automatically tag your entries with your location and the weather. You know, the basics.

I like Day One. It’s well designed and covers all the basics of journaling. But its feature set is relatively limited, and its design is uninspired and rather blasé.

My major problem with this new version, though, is that Bloom went for a proprietary solution to sync your data between its iOS and Mac apps. So you’re storing your valuable, personal journal data in a closed ecosystem. It’s relatively difficult to get your data out of it and you can only ever use Day One to look at it. You are entirely dependent on this little American company called Bloom to maintain and safeguard your valuable, private journal data. If Bloom bites it, or if you decide to move away from iOS or Mac… not pretty.

Awesome Note

It’s worth stating at the outset that Awesome Note is not designed specifically to be a journaling app. But that’s one of the things it does, and it does really, really well. Awesome Note can easily match Day One, feature for feature (and more, actually), at a fraction of the price. Awesome Note costs just $8: $4 for the iPad app and $4 for the iPhone app (you buy them separately). Chump change.

Like Day One, Awesome Note is also beautifully designed and easy to use. I prefer the Awesome Note interface to Day One.

There isn’t a version of Awesome Note for Mac, but that’s okay. Because instead of a proprietary sync solution, Awesome Note can use Evernote to store and sync notes in the cloud. So on your Mac (or Windows computer, for that matter) you can just use the excellent Evernote client.

And there’s the real benefit of Awesome Note: your data is not trapped in a closed, proprietary environment. Should BRID, the small company behind Awesome Note ever disappear and its apps die*, your data is safe in the data store of the massive, secure Evernote machine.

Anyway, beyond basic syncing, Evernote opens up Awesome Note to a world of extensibility, because Evernote can hook into almost any online service out there. Like the insanely awesome IFTTT.

Day One is ignorant of what you do on social media. And because it’s such a closed platform, you can’t push anything into it. But with Awesome Note syncing through Evernote, you can have IFTTT publish whatever you do on whatever social platform you use to an Awesome Note notebook via Evernote. And then over time, automagically, Awesome Note will build up a history of your online exploits.

There are a couple other areas where I think Awesome Note improves on Day One.

Customization

In Awesome Note, you can customize pretty much every aspect of the interface with colour, texture, and icons. With Day One, I hope you like blue and white. Because that’s all you get. Brrrr.

Integration

Awesome Note integrates with your the calendar and reminders on your iPad or iPhone. So, if you want, you can view your life activites and tasks juxtaposed against information you’ve stored in your journal. This provides a lot of personal insight.

I suppose the one major caveat to Awesome Note is that, to sync, it requires a little bit more custom configuration. You have to step outside of the app to set up an Evernote account if you don’t already have one. But I think that little bit of extra effort is worth it for the cost savings, added features, and improved interface. (All that said, Awesome Note will also sync via Apple’s iCloud, if you prefer an easier-to-set-up but more closed system.)

Day One is attracting a lot of attention these days, thanks to Apple, and I’m sure that’s resulting in a lot of sales. But if you read this, consider Awesome Note instead. I think you’ll prefer it.

* That’s a real concern, actually. At just $4 per app, you have to wonder how BRID is making any money at this. I highlighted that low cost as a benefit, but I really think Awesome Note should cost more. The total $8 price tag for both iPad and iPhone apps is simply not representative of the incredible value. If it were me, I’d doduble the price of each app. I hope BRID survives and continues to deliver new versions of Awesome Note, and I’d encourage them to increase their prices to improve the likelihood of that.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned covering the tech beat for almost two decades, is that CEOs love to spew BS to throw competitors and the public alike off their scent.

Take the late Steve Jobs. He was full of it. At the first All Things D conference in 2003 he stated:

There are no plans to make a tablet. It turns out people want keyboards. … “We look at the tablet and we think it’s going to fail.” Tablets appeal to rich guys with plenty of other PCs and devices already … We didn’t think we’d do well in the cell phone business. … We chose to do the iPod instead of a PDA.
(Bags and Baggage; Friday, May 30, 2003)

Hindsight is 20/20 of course, so it’s easy to pick apart his comments now, and Jobs may have been gripped by an uncharacteristic bout of naivety at the time. But that’s unlikely, as it’s now generally well-acknowledged that Apple was hard at work on the iPhone as early as mid-2004.

More likely Jobs was playing a game of bait-and-switch with Apple’s existing and future competitors.

Of course, the 7.9″ iPad Mini hit the streets 2 years later, almost to the day.

The other factors at play here are a changing marketplace and a company’s willingness to learn from and adapt to the marketplace. I think that’s the case with the iPad Mini: Apple just realized that it was wrong and people actually did want a smaller (or maybe just cheaper) tablet.

Of course there’s the lame hair-splitting that Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook did in regard to the iPad Mini’s screen dimensions:

We would not make a 7-inch tablet. We don’t think they’re good products. We would never make one. One of the reasons is size. Not sure if you saw our keynote, but the difference in just the real estate size in 7.9 vs. 7 is 35 percent, and when you look at usable area is much great than that, more like 57 percent.
(All Things D, Apple Talks Lower Margins Now, Ginormous Sales Later)

Uh huh. Yeah. Right. Because that’s how most consumers think, in terms of abstract pixel dimensions and “usable area”. Better to just bit the bullet and admite, we changed our minds.

All of this is to say, simply, that you can’t trust a CEO’s public statements about what their company might or might not do. It’s not in their interests to expose their company to competition before it’s prepared for it, and it’s not in the public’s interest to hear about products before they’re ready to ship (got it, RIM?). What’s more, contrary to popular belief, things change.

The other tool a CEO has to work with is innuendo. Like, Apple won’t produce a PDA, but it’ll produce a phone. The company won’t produce a Tablet PC, but it’ll produce a tablet. It’s not 7 inches, it’s 7.9.

So maybe Facebook won’t produce a phone. Instead, it’ll produce an anti-phone, or a handheld social media meter, or a AdBox or whatever marketing term they choose to identify a handheld computer that operates on the Facebook platform.

But with a simple swipe, you’ll be able to “toss” the video stream to another display, like your TV screen.

It’s really not unlike Apple’s new AirPlay technology, actually, but Apple’s seems more expansive in its vision. AirPlay is more of an independent protocol and will support a broader range of devices like stereo receivers and even cheap consumer-grade speakers.

I just felt like I had to toot my horn today when I caught Google use of the word “fling” to describe the services; it was way close to my “toss.”

So, I was watching this video co-produced by HP, Adobe, and Microsoft yesterday…

…and I was struck by one thing: they still don’t get it.

And by it, I mean the iPad specifically, but in a more general sense I mean humans.

Like, check this screen shot:

This is how Adobe, HP, and Microsoft imagine that you want to edit photos on a mobile device.

The problem is, there’s hardly any photo on screen to edit. Look at all that surrounding interface! A browser bar, a browser tab bar, a massive tool panel, scroll bars (that aren’t even required!), and then big, fat, black bars on either side of the photo.

Not as if that makes sense or anything; I mean, filling the screen with the photo you’re editing and kicking the interface to the curb?

Even though these two screen shots demonstrate the exact same application – Adobe’s Photoshop.com – they clearly demonstrate the difference between Apple’s approach to mobile computing and the approach that just about everyone else is taking.

While it’s true that Adobe is responsible for the user interfaces in both screen shots, it’s important to examine the constraints that they experienced in designing each.

For the interface demonstrated in the first screen shot, on the HP device, Adobe was limited only by what its own proprietary media platform, Flash, could do. In other words, that’s Adobe’s version of an ideal mobile photo editing environment.

In the second screen shot, for the iPhone app, Adobe had to conform to Apple’s iPhone human interface guidelines. That’s why such a different app was produced.

I think of it this way: there are two parts to every sentence in the English language, the subject and the predicate. Apple’s mobile philosophy focuses on the subject – the person or thing which the sentence is about. In most cases that would be the person using the device or the material on the device they’re dealing with.

The other guys focus on the predicate aspect of mobile computing. They focus on the aspect of the situation that modifies the experience of the user. In most cases that is the software or the device itself.

So if I write a sentence like, “Sue edited the photo on her mobile device,” Apple would be concerned with the primary subject, Sue.

On the other hand, Adobe, Microsoft and HP would clearly focus on the mobile device and its software.

The result in the latter approach is an overabundance of technology. In the first screen shot, there’s definitely too much interface. The app has decided not to consider the needs of the user and instead just sort of pukes out everything it’s got in terms of functionality, cluttering the screen with a distraction of visual detritus.

Apple’s iPhone, on the other hand, provides the user with what he or she wants, as he or she requires it. Toolbars disappear off-screen when they’re not required for use. They don’t hang around to distract in perpetuity.

In many iPhone apps, there is literally no interface. Consider this screen shot from the acclaimed iPhone writing app, WriteRoom:

That’s it. Just you and your writing. Nothing else.

Compare that to Microsoft’s take on mobile word processing:

I’ll skip past the horrid green skin and just point out that, even on a miniscule screen, Microsoft believes you need as almost as much interface as subject area. And that’s just wrong.

The point of the matter is that, as Apple continues to release revolutionary new devices, first the iPhone and soon the iPad, competitors continue to miss the point. It isn’t about the device at all. That’s why Apple’s physical design is so minimalist, and it’s why they don’t pump the tech specs in their ads.

It’s about friction. Apple is all about reducing the friction a person experiences when they interact with a technological environment.

Until the other guys figure that out and quit drowning us in over-designed user interfaces and dramatic device forms, Apple’s just going to continue kicking their collective ass.